The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Generally, a server management controller refers to a specialized microcontroller that manages the interface between system management software and platform hardware. The server management controller can be embedded on the motherboard of a computer, generally a server. For example, different types of sensors can be built into the computer system, and the server management controller reads these sensors to obtain parameters such as temperature, cooling fan speeds, power status, operating system (OS) status, etc. The server management controller monitors the sensors and can send alerts to a system administrator via the network if any of the parameters do not stay within preset limits, indicating a potential failure of the system. The administrator can also remotely communicate with the server management controller to take some corrective action such as resetting or power cycling the system to get a hung OS running again.
In a standard rack server system, a server management controller can be used for managing and monitoring the server system, and the server management controller that runs IPMI stack can monitor up to 256 sensors as per IPMI standards. However, the number of sensors that need to be monitored by the server management controller increases day by day. In some server systems, may be more than 256 sensors. There is a greater practical need to monitor sensors more than 256 in some of the modern platform designs.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.